Bureau of Metereology

September 7, 2005 — 10.00am

Architects Rice Skinner (associated with GHD)

Restaurant Le Georges is on level five of Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is fashioned from aluminium shells that are arranged over the floor like animals in a zoo - and the zoo is Piano and Rogers' late-1970s art gallery-museum that looks like a Meccano set of steel frames and coloured ducts.

Le Georges takes on the aesthetic of open space with a flowing geometry, so it becomes a set of buildings within a building. The macrobiotic-shaped pods that drift in the big high-tech space were designed by architects Jacob and MacFarlane, who won the commission in 1998.

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This project influenced many designers with the idea of free, unconnected organic forms floating in a rigid space.

The sculptured aluminium husks are like eggs (the kind shown in films about aliens) and they work as the productive areas for the kitchen, toilets, bar and meeting rooms.

They are seductive shapes, appropriate to the original architecture and almost futuristic - like an illustration of flying saucers in a cheap comic strip - and the concept has since been reinvented and stylised around the world.

One better example is at the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne's Docklands, designed by architects Rice Skinner.

Their design brief was not easy, because the 850 staff required simple office space, with walls and doors, where they could work privately and quietly.

Within the building (designed by Bligh Voller Nield) the interior architects have provided a backdrop of offices, workshops, laboratories and technical spaces that are in the normal run of office fit-outs.

A colour coding of deep reds, timber veneers and a striped carpet gives these spaces a sense of order, and although the architecture is not intended to shock or differ much from any modern office, the deep hues and strong dark lines are more confident than the bland beiges, greys and pale blues so often used.

Rice Skinner have used black frames - the edges of walls, desktop screens, windows and door frames - that slice through the spaces, setting frameworks through the otherwise nondescript office floors.

Most significantly, the architects made use of a number of "winter gardens" in the building. Internal gardens in big spaces over a number of levels are usually designed for snowbound environments where they can capture sunlight and provide the only open spaces worth visiting.

Winter gardens unite levels via stairs and visual connections, so they become places for gathering and socialising in an otherwise private organisation.

At the Bureau of Meteorology, they are day-lit, which floods natural light into the open offices, and they contain a number of meeting room pods - like Le Georges.

These pods can be seen from outside, so the building takes on an amorphous life, not constrained by the generic grid of floor-wall-partition-desk that characterises a conventional office block.

They are sculptured, some open with timber frames and others clad in a flexible semi-translucent plastic wrapper.

The effect is like being inside a submarine floating in a wash of white water, and the sounds (of conversations, pens bouncing on pages and fingers tapping) are enhanced by the room shape.

From outside, especially at night, the carcasses sometimes appear as glowing red torches, at other times like back-lit skeletons.

It has been argued that the Parisian model offers an archaeological critique of the city by tracing its growth as a fragment of something different located inside something familiar.

While this is not Paris, nor a restaurant inside a world-famous gallery, it is a very worthy exercise in the interpretation and reworking of an original composition.

Rice Skinner have designed a variation on a theme - just as musicians rework the compositions of others - and it is a worthy contribution to the city.